Eco-Poetics for the City Dwellers

In this workshop we’ll be experimenting with the strategies and intuitions of nature poetry applied to the built urban environment. We’ll be entering that experiment by breaking down how poets, Jon Sands, Fatimah Ashgar, and Elizabeth Acevedo, write about city dwelling subjects, ranging from humble city rats to picturesque gazebos. We’ll look at how these writers parse through the many systems, natural and unnatural, that are constantly at play in the city, and how these poets explore tensions unearthed between their identity and their city.

The main goal for the workshop is to brainstorm an aspect of our city that might seem ‘unworthy,’ superficial, or overlooked, and to imagine what it might be an expert at. How has its perspective been shaped by its circumstances? In what ways may it actually be an vital aspect of our city as we know it? We can think of poems as little cities and systems in and of themselves, where all details are at play and interconnected with one another, by design or by emergence. For writers age 13 – 18 ONLY.